6. The Old Forest
In this chapter, the hobbits leave their homeland and cross the border to the other side. We know they have already encountered “the other,” the alien content of the unconscious – in the form of fox, rider, and elf – but during those encounters, the hobbits were still in the relatively familiar landscape, that is, within the sphere of their own conscious mind. But now they venture into the truly unknown, previously uncharted territory.
This borderland from which the hobbits set out, where Merry lives and where Frodo pretends to move, lies adjacent to the Old Forest. According to common knowledge and some experience, it is a dangerous wilderness, and therefore, the hobbits who lived here long ago planted a high, dense hedge, like a wall against the unknown. Like most people, they wish to live in their conscious, familiar self and shut out foreign, disturbing impulses “from outside.”
As has been established, the hobbits’ world, the Shire, is the domain of the Good Mother. What, then, might we imagine lies on the other side of the wall they have erected for protection? The Terrible Mother, of course. We will recount how the story describes this area. With knowledge of symbols and analogical thinking, it becomes clear that this section deals with the archetypal Mother.
When the hobbits leave the house on a very early morning, there is dew and mist, with cackling hens somewhere in the darkness. They reach the high, impenetrable hedge, “studded with silver-glistening spiderwebs.” Led by Merry, they travel through a “dark and damp” tunnel. He closes the underground gate behind them. “‘There!’ said Merry. ‘You have left the Shire.’” The forest they enter on the other side is described by Merry as “queer” – the same word used to describe the encounter between the hobbits and the fox, and the hobbits and the elves.
According to the story, the Old Forest has a higher level of awareness than other forests and can change to block, mislead, or even harm people. Indeed, the hobbits constantly feel watched, and Merry suggests that the trees “plot” and that branches “grasp.” The Old Forest’s perceived consciousness illustrates that it is a complex with its own “light of nature,” in conflict with Frodo or the ego. Forests in the Shire feel less conscious to the hobbits because they are not in conflict with them. We previously used the analogy of a fish and water; the environment, the Mother, in the hobbits’ land is not perceived as separate from them, for they are part of her. But here, in the Old Forest, they notice the light of nature because it is “something else,” alien and thus uncanny.
Merry further describes the forest as a “labyrinth.” As a symbol, the labyrinth represents the cycle of life-death-transformation-rebirth, with its dangers in the form of monsters and the risk of getting lost. Sometimes, the labyrinth and the mandala shape it can form when viewed from above express the individuation process. As we will see, the experience in the Old Forest, and its extension, the Barrow-downs, is indeed central to Frodo’s personal development.
Returning to the description of the area: “all the trunks were green or grey with moss and slimy, shaggy growths”; on a treeless hill, they see “mist” in the “damp and deeply cut hollow.” As they re-enter the trees, they strive to avoid the forest’s center but are constantly forced into ditches with thickets, leading them toward the very thing they wish to avoid. This can be seen as a description of a complex, which has a kind of gravitational pull, causing us to repeatedly stumble into or do exactly what we have resolved to avoid. It is as if the complex, like the Old Forest, has its own will and attraction. The hobbits, or the ego, cannot maintain distance from the complex and soon find themselves in its midst, overwhelmed by its power. First, the hobbits realize they are lost, a description of losing their ability to navigate in the complex’s gravitational field. They slide down a deeper gully than any before and must follow it downward; the ground becomes wetter and swampier until the moisture forms a stream they follow as they wander in a “deep and shadowy stream-ravine”; and finally, they find themselves in a valley with golden sunlight and drowsy vegetation. “In the midst of it all, a dark-brown river flowed lazily, bordered by ancient willows…” As far as we can recall, this is the only time a body of water is described as brown in the story, but this is just another illustration of the Old Forest’s feminine quality; brown, after all, evokes earth, which is the Mother’s domain (while the sky belongs to the Father, as we will often have reason to remind ourselves).
Alongside all the moisture, obscurity, disorientation, crevices, descent, and so forth, which so unmistakably make the Old Forest the Mother’s domain, “drowsiness” now follows. Whenever the hobbits are near the Mother, they become sleepy. In the presence of the elves, who represent the Good Mother, sleep always occurs (with the elves in the forsts, as we have seen, and later in Rivendell and Lothlórien). Here, they are near the Terrible Mother, and drowsiness overtakes them. We understand that this is something they wish to avoid, for unlike with the elves, they fight against sleep this time.
They stagger toward the willows by the river to rest. Merry and Pippin sit leaning against a particularly large and ancient tree, which has ominous cracks and branches like “long-fingered hands”; while Frodo collapses among its roots, which stretch into the water like “gnarled dragonets straining down to drink.” We see that symbols of the Mother continue to pour from the text – grasping and devouring.
Sam is as drowsy as the others, but he does not fall asleep, nor does he succumb to the enchantment of the Terrible Mother. This loyal and seemingly simple hobbit has something within him that makes him particularly steadfast. We will return to this. For now, we can only note that he discovers Frodo is being pulled into the water (drowning) and that the old tree is slowly swallowing Merry and Pippin. Sam manages to rouse Frodo, and they try in vain to save their friends. Frodo panics and begins running aimlessly, shouting for help. There is nothing else he can do; he is “lost and witless.”
Once again, a miracle occurs: an entirely unexpected figure appears – a silly old man, it seems. This rescuer, too, comes with song (so we know he is good), and once again, the hobbits find themselves “enchanted.” He introduces himself as Tom Bombadil to the frantic hobbits pleading for help. Tom Bombadil says he knows how to deal with “Old Man Willow.” He strikes the tree with a branch he has broken off and expresses anger that it has awakened. “You’re supposed to sleep. Eat earth! Dig deep! Drink water! Go to sleep!” He repeats that this image of the Mother is associated with earth, the underground, water – and sleep.
In short, this peculiar figure – short, not quite as tall as a man (not quite a grown man, in other words), with a blue feather in his hat – rescues the hobbits to take them to his home. He intends to offer them – or rather, have his woman prepare – a meal of cream, honeycomb, bread, and butter. (Neither elves nor Bombadil offer meat.) Then Tom Bombadil hops away, and the hobbits follow. But they are not as quick as Bombadil, so he disappears into the forest ahead of them. When they lose contact with this father figure, the darkness of the Great Mother thickens around them: shadows fall, tree branches feel threatening, the mist rises, “curls,” dark vapor emerges from the very ground, and their journey becomes like a “ghastly dream.” But they manage to escape the forest and find Bombadil’s inviting house. Far beyond it, they can glimpse the Barrow-downs – Tom Bombadil and the Barrow-downs are thus part of the same image. They step over the threshold, and “the golden-yellow light enveloped them completely.”
What happened here? The situation is similar to when a black rider, sniffing, crept toward the hobbits, and there was no way out for them. Then, the rider, the “adult man,” was replaced by the elves, who represent the Good Mother. In the Old Forest, the situation is reversed. The hobbits have left the domain of the Good Mother, passed through a tunnel to the other side, where the Terrible Mother reigns. They are, in fact, on the verge of dying in her clutches – enclosed, suffocated, drowned. The one who comes to their rescue now is the Good Father. To clarify: when the grown man threatened them, the hobbits were saved by the feminine elves; when the Terrible Mother threatens them, they are saved by the masculine spirit.
This “spirit” (we will return to the question of what Tom Bombadil is) appears in the story because Frodo, for the first time in his life, encounters the Terrible Mother. He experiences the shocking realization that the Mother is not inherently good – she can also be evil. This experience leads to the next insight: the Mother must be balanced by the Father. “Help! Help!” he cries.
The Good Father emerges from the depths of the unconscious when Frodo becomes despairing and cries out for help. It is the first time Frodo acts in panic in the story – his level of consciousness drops, and he enters a state of abaissement du niveau mental (“lowering of the mental level”), as Jung calls the phenomenon (after Pierre Janet); a state that “can arise as a result of physical and mental exhaustion … violent emotional upheaval or shock.”[1] Although Jung might not agree that this is a possible consequence of the state, we can imagine in this context that this lowering of the mental level – Frodo’s temperament suggests a relatively high level of consciousness (more so than Bilbo, for example) – allows him to perceive, or even invite, this unique and distinct figure in the story; much like “primitive” rituals aim to lower the participant’s level of consciousness through rhythmic dance, for example, to connect with spirits or images of the unconscious. The Good Father appears as a rather foolish, playful old man with a blue feather in his hat. Unlike other significant characters in the story – riders, elves, Gandalf, Aragorn, and so on – Tom Bombadil has only one task. Once it is complete, he disappears from the story again. Had he lingered with Frodo, the latter would never have needed to carry out the quest. The Good Mother would simply have been replaced by the Good Father.
Old Man Willow
We must comment on the name of the Terrible Mother as a tree – “Old Man Willow.” If it represents the Mother, why is the tree called a “man”? Before addressing this, let us recall how the Tree’s domain is described. We were particularly attentive to this in this chapter because it contains such explicit Mother imagery and is thus particularly significant for the story to emphasize; we have seen silvery spiderwebs, dew, mist, fog, grasping, ensnaring, suffocating, sleep, shadows, and darkness – all well-known symbols of the feminine, yin, and/or the Mother. The tree itself contains these images, as it lulls, grasps, drowns, and devours. It is entirely evident that this is an “Old Woman Willow.”
So why “Old Man Willow”? We have touched on this before and will likely return to it, but in any case, the Great Mother is unconscious – she is buried, so we do not see her. During Tolkien’s lifetime (1892–1973) – and still today – the mother archetype is largely absent from our culture, which is consequently dreadfully one-sided. This deserves a broader discussion, and perhaps we will have it one day, but in general, our culture has no conscious relationship with the mother archetype, except in a metaphorical sense, such as the church, the university, the nation, the party, and so on. This is precisely how it appears in the story: the mother archetype is ever-present, but we do not perceive it consciously. For this reason, an old woman does not come walking through the forest; instead, the archetype is represented by a tree, which is also called a “man.” The culture of Middle-earth has layered masculinity over the world, over her; not necessarily to emphasize the masculine – and certainly not consciously – but because the masculine is the norm, the default, the starting point. “Man” is not perceived as masculine and does not necessarily denote something masculine; it indicates something neutral, undefined. If we do not know the “sex” of the tree, it is simply a “man” in Middle-earth.[2]
Thus, in our world, in Tolkien’s world, and in Frodo’s world, the mother archetype operates on each being without anyone knowing what is truly at work. The hobbits do not perceive the feminine elves as women but as giggling, graceful men who offer food, provide safety, and lull the hobbits to sleep. Similarly, the story’s characters do not perceive the devouring tree in an explicitly feminine environment as a woman but as a man. We will see more examples of this.
But there is another reason the feminine is cloaked in masculine guise, beyond ignorance. Because the dark side of the mother archetype is absent, rendered unconscious, it feels particularly unpleasant when it does seep through. If Tolkien were to call the lulling, grasping, devouring, strangling, drowning tree “Old Woman Willow,” it would cause an ontological shock in the reader, the hobbits in the story – and likely in Tolkien himself. As long as the monster – whatever it may be in a given situation – has a masculine tinge, despite its clearly archetypal femininity, the hero’s saga can continue. The professor keeps writing, and the teenager keeps reading without a thought to what is really happening from a psychological perspective. It is only at the border of Mordor, near the climax, that the story becomes explicit – the Terrible Mother appears as the paralyzing giant spider, the she-lob. But that is far off and rather unsettling, so we return to the cozy safety of good old Tom Bombadil’s cottage.
The Nurturing Mother and the Devouring Mother
We have seen that Frodo lived in great comfort with Bilbo in a hole under the ground, in an idyllic world where he did not need to work for his livelihood or face the troubles of the adult world, and we have established that this is a result of his symbiosis with the Good Mother. But this was no longer sufficient; there was something within him that pulled him away, that wanted to free him from this bond. Gandalf represented this impulse, Frodo’s daemon or calling.
So Frodo sets out, and just as he leaves the bosom of the Good Mother, he steps straight into the arms of the Terrible Mother, "Old Woman Willow", who engulfs and suffocates the hobbits. What is the dynamic at play here? Jung explains this transformation of the mother image in Frodo’s experience:
“The greatest blessing in this world is the greatest curse in the unconscious … the whale dragon that devours you, is the thing that has nourished and supported you hitherto – just as the benevolent mother that brought you up becomes in later life a devouring mother that swallows you again. … she supports the life of your childhood and youth, but to become adult you must leave all that, and then the mother force is against you. So anyone attempting to leave this world for another kind of consciousness .. has the [monster] against him…”[3]
Thus, when Frodo decides to leave the Shire and embark on his adventure, perhaps hoping it will be like Bilbo’s, he walks straight into the Devouring Mother. He goes from being “devoured” by the Good Mother to being “devoured” by the Terrible Mother. He cannot shield himself from either. This is why Tom Bombadil is so important to the story and, consequently, to Frodo’s development – he can help Frodo establish distance from the Great Mother. This will not make Frodo immune to her, far from it – we will see this again and again – but it is a first step toward not simply being engulfed by her when she appears.
Footnotes
[1] Carl Gustav Jung, “Concerning Rebirth,” in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, trans. R. F. C. Hull, 2nd ed., vol. 9, part 1 of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Bollingen Series 20 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), par. 214.
[2] This kind of shift is historically common; see, for example, chapter XLV in The Golden Bough.
[3] Carl Gustav Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1932, ed. Sonu Shamdasani, Philemon Series (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 51